Although the Surfers never disbanded officially
and, in fact, continued to exist as a touring outfit throughout the first
decade of the 21st century, the release of this odds-and-ends compilation in
2002 was telling — it's like a shadowy retrospective of the band's entire career,
where, for one last time, you can quickly browse through all their life stages
and remind yourself what exactly it was that they brought to the table. That
said, I must admit that there is pretty little here to go ga-ga over; mostly,
it's just stuff for the loyal zealots and the historians, and much of it
presented here in awful «home recording» sound quality, too.

Of minor interest are such tracks as the Rembrandt Pussyhorse outtake ʽI Love
You Peggyʼ, whose title may be a not-too-subtle reference to Buddy Holly (Gibby
does begin singing it in a slightly Buddy-ish hiccupy voice, but then the vocal
overdubs quickly head into the realm of total insanity, and Leary's shrill
folk-pop riff is the only thing that allows the song to preserve some structure);
the instrumental ʽEindhoven Chicken Masqueʼ from the same sessions, with a
lively mariachi brass fanfare section and a blazing guitar break from Paul; two
outtakes from the Butt­hole Surfers
sessions, ʽJust A Boyʼ and ʽI Hate My Jobʼ, reminding you of how this band
actual­ly started out as an aggressive punk rock outfit — this stuff just
sounds like frickin' Black Flag; and, all of a sudden, a cover of the 13th
Floor Elevators' ʽEarthquakeʼ from the Hairway
To Steven sessions — where you realize the uncanny resemblance of Gibby's
voice to Roky Erick­son's — but, although Leary adds some excellent psychedelic
guitar solos, I also find myself strangely missing the electric jug of the
original.

The rest of these songs are even less memorable
— some poor-quality demo recordings where the low frequencies drown out all the
high ones; some chaotic noise tracks that sound just like any other chaotic
noise track (ʽHetero Skeletonʼ; ʽSpace IIʼ); and some brief throwaways like an
out of place thick fuzzy bass solo (ʽConcubine Soloʼ) or a «bonus track» that
says hello to Napalm Death by being only six seconds long (no vocals, though).
A keen musical ear may extract the beginnings of a few nifty ideas here and
there, but it's all raw and unfinished. And they probably shouldn't have
screwed up the sequencing — as I said, historically-minded people are more like­ly
to be interested in these outtakes than those who are too lazy to care about
what came after what, and this means that you'll have to re-assemble it all
back together in chronological order. On the other side, you can say that Butthole
Surfers never wrote music for lazy people — or, for that matter, that they
never wrote music for organized
people. A mess is a mess is a mess, whichever way you'd like to look at it, so
here's one more chunk of mess for you.